THE AMERICANS just long to believe the extraordinary feat of Dara Torres, but can they? The 41-year-old mother of a two-year-old daughter will be swimming for the United States in Beijing, 24 years after she won her first Olympic gold medal.

She has become a shining symbol for American matrons, beloved of a country which is eager for a new heroine but which is still fearful that the feat will be exposed as a sham, and that drugs have aided her latest comeback.

With the Olympics next month attracting its usual saturation coverage on nationwide television, Americans are desperate for something wholesome in sport to replace the doping scandals that have been plaguing athletics, baseball and American Football. Torres has seemed the answer.

She won the US Olympic Trials in both the 50m and 100m freestyle earlier this month, thus qualifying to become the first American to swim in five Olympics. She already has nine Olympic medals and three more would bring her level with the current record held by Jenny Thompson. She claimed five medals in Sydney eight years ago, two relay gold and three individual bronze, at age 33. Although she has dropped out of the individual 100m to concentrate on the one-length sprint in Beijing, she is likely to swim the freestyle legs in two relays.

Mark Spitz, winner of seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics, says of his friend: “This is a major statement. She lived up to the premise that nothing is impossible with a lot of hard work.”

She certainly knows that. Although she “only” swims 35,000m a week, her partner David Hoffman says: “Her once a day is worth everybody else’s twice a day.”

Like Britain’s Mark Foster, another sprinter, who will be 38 at the Games, she does a lot of weight training. However, it is not just her physical prowess that is impressive. Bob Bowman, coach to Michael Phelps, says of her movement in the water: “Everything moves as one motion. It’s just a unit.”

Torres, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar model, has overcome two divorces, a battle with bulimia and several knee operations to be in the form of her life at 41, 26 years after she set her first US record for the 50m freestyle. She has retired several times but has been repeatedly drawn back to the sport when the prospect of the Olympics has appeared. Part of the reason for her physical ability is that she has rarely relaxed.

Mel Stewart, a former US teammate, says: “Dara has never really stopped training. She’s always been in shape. She’s always been fit and she’s always been fast.”

Torres would have found it much more difficult to return to peak physical condition if she had stopped training for a long spell, rather than continuing to exercise.

Many Americans want to revel in this story but they can’t. Has Torres been taking drugs? To answer these charges, she informed the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) of her planned comeback nearly a year ago. Along with other American swimmers, including Phelps, she became part of a group determined to proclaim to a sceptical world that they were clean. It is called “Project Believe”.

She said: “DNA test, blood test, urine test: whatever you want to do, just test me.” They did, and the USADA and her supporters have pointed out that nobody would want to run such a risk if they were not clean because she would not know what might be revealed.

They have found nothing. Torres does take medication for her asthma and she declared that immediately. She has been repeatedly tested, and was even interrupted early one morning when breast-feeding her daughter, Tessa.

She says: “I’m clean and I want a clean sport. I swam against swimmers [notably East Germans] who were dirty my whole life. And that’s just something I wouldn’t do.”

In the euphoria of the Olympics, the American public may well accept her. But some will always have their doubts.